Felicia M. McCarren's Books

Dance Pathologies

Performance, Poetics, Medicine

By: Felicia M. McCarren

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Dance Pathologies

Performance, Poetics, Medicine

By: Felicia M. McCarren

A history of dances pathologization may startle readers who find in dance performance grace, discipline, geometry, poetry, and the bodys transcendence of itself. Exploring dances historical links to the medical and scientific connotations of a pathology, this book asks what has subtended the idealization of dance in the West. It investigates the nineteenth-century response, in the intersections of dance, literature, and medicine, to the complex and long-standing connections between illness, madness, poetry, and performance. In the nineteenth century, medicine becomes a major cultural index to measure the bodys meanings. As a particularly performative form of madness, nineteenth-century hysteria preserved the traditional connection to dance in medical descriptions of choreas. In its withholding of speech and its use of body code, dance, like hysteria, functions as a form of symptomatic expression. Yet by working like a symptom, dance performance can also be read as a commentary on symptomatology and as a condition of possibility for such alternative approaches to mental illness as psychoanalysis. By redeeming as art what is lost in hysteria, dance expresses non-hysterically what only hysteria had been able to express: the somatic translation of idea, the physicalization of meaning. Medicines discovery of idea manifesting itself in the body in mental illness strikingly parallels a literary fascination with the ability of nineteenth-century dance to manifest idea, suggesting that the evolution of medical thinking about mind-body relations as they malfunction in madness, as well as changes in the cultural reception of danced representations of these relations, might be paradigmatic shifts caused by the same cultural factors: concern about the body as a site of meaning and about vision as a theater of knowledge.

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Page Count

292

Publisher

Stanford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0804735247

ISBN 13

9780804735247

Dancing Machines

Choreographies of the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

By: Felicia M. McCarren

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Dancing Machines

Choreographies of the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

By: Felicia M. McCarren

The age of high tech is haunted by an image from the last century that developed in the three decades between the patenting of the cinematographe and its turn toward sound: the dancing machine, paradox of the ease of mechanization and its tortures, embodiment of the motor and the automaton, image of fusion and fragmentation. An excavation of this image, in the historical context of maximum productivity and mechanical reproducibility, reveals its development in European Modernism--Modernism drawn to dancers of American, African, and Asian origins, to Taylorism as well as to Primitivism, to cinema and to myth. This book traces the abstraction and anonymity of the bodies making machines dance, in the codes of modernisms graphic and choreographic, and in the streamlined gestures of industry, avant-garde art, and entertainment. What surfaces is dances centrality to machine aesthetics and to its alternatives, as well as to the early elaboration of the machine that would become the ultimate guarantor of modern dances de-mechanization, the motion picture camera.

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Page Count

276

Publisher

Stanford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0804739889

ISBN 13

9780804739887

French Moves

The Cultural Politics of Le Hip Hop

By: Felicia M. McCarren

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French Moves

The Cultural Politics of Le Hip Hop

By: Felicia M. McCarren

This book shows how le hip hop reflects a republic of culture rather than a culture industry; a minority identity politics that takes shape as a movement poetics or figural language; and the public valorization of dance as a technique, meriting unemployment compensation and understood as a high-tech knowledge practice.

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Page Count

242

Publisher

Oxford University Press, USA

Published Date

ISBN 10

0199939977

ISBN 13

9780199939978

Book's by Felicia M. McCarren

Dance Pathologies

Dance Pathologies

Dancing Machines

Dancing Machines

French Moves

French Moves

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